HIJAB CONTROVERSY HAS BEEN MANUFACTURED TO CREATE ANARCHY

One needs to be careful in extending support to a cause whose motives are suspect and which perpetuates patriarchy.

- VIVEK GUMASTE

To view the hijab brouhaha merely as La spontaneous isolated altercation between a clutch of girls and the college authorities of a government run institution in Udupi, Karnataka is to miss the wood for the trees.

When carefully parsed, this confrontation appears to be an orchestrated controversy that is a part of a bigger gameplan; a design that clearly has fundamentalist and political undertones and is a subtle attempt by some to hijack the secularism of the nation by exploiting its fault lines.

To fully comprehend the issue, we need to examine the sequence of events that led to this crisis. While events came to head in early January, the makings of this controversy can be traced back to October-November 2021. On 29 October, 2021, some Muslim girl students who had participated in an ABVP-organised protest against a sexual assault on a student came to the notice of the Campus Front of India (CFI), a student wing of the radical Islamic Popular Front of India. These particular students were then counselled not to join ABVP-organised protests, and advised to join the CFI instead. Today some of these same students are at the forefront of this agitation.